>"Yes, kids will want to play this instead of Mario and Zelda"
>>12488321Easy: Tramiel-era Atari really only cared about the ST. All the older hardware they inherited was just a quick way to make a few extra bucks and they had no intention of investing more than the bare minimum into it.
the 7800 was a neat system, and 2600 backwards compatibility was great, but it came out too late and was too far behind the times.
>>12488826This. It was designed in 1983 and planned for a 1984 release. It was just too little too late by the time it actually came out.
sonic couldve saved the 7800
>>12488826The best-selling 7200 games were early 80s arcade games, and it was competition was 1986-1990 NES. Saying it was behind the times is an understatement, it's like a man on a horse trying to race a Ferrari.
>>12488841It was backward for 1984. The thing couldn't really scroll and the cartridge slot had no write lines. Mind you the Famicom was already out at that point. Atari had no ability to envision games beyond single screen arcade stuff.
>>12488849The most baffling design decision was re-using the 2600's sound hardware.
The 7800 has the unique ability whereby all screen objects can be set to a background tile or a sprite, thus 256 total sprites can be on screen. This is because it was designed to play arcade games with a ton of flicker-free sprites, but it can't really do NES type of games.
>>12488847And beating a dead horse when someone already admits a point just makes you a faggot
>>12488852>can't do nes type gamesTf?
5200 shouldn't exist.7800 should've taken its place.
When I was a kid I stayed up for 72 hours straight and convinced myself that Pole Position II for 7800 was the most realistic looking racing game ever
>>124889135200 was just a consolized Atari 400/800. It made sense at the time
>>12488321The 7800 would've been a bitchin' console in 1984 when it was supposed to release, but it got pushed back to 1986 for reasons. They also fucked up by using the 2600's sound chip instead of the superior POKEY found in the 5200.
>>12488925XEGS bros...
>>12488925No it didn’t, by the time it was released it was a way better deal to just get a 400.
>>12488849>the cartridge slot had no write linesI'm guessing battery saves would be impossible then?
>>12488936you technically could but it would be a royal PITA. some Atari 2600 games had cartridge RAM and they needed various funny tricks to access it.
meaning you couldn't see the RAM directly and had to access it via soft switches, similar to writing to video RAM on any of the later consoles
>>12488321Nobody fucking liked the original Zelda or Zelda 2 back in the day that shit is revisionist bullshit.
>>12488845>gotta go fast>screen has to pause and scroll for 2 seconds everytime you touch the edge of it>even when you're moving upwards
>>12488854He's agreeing with him and wanted to say more besides "yeah uh true uh this"
>>12489051There are 80s usenet posts of people shit talking Zelda 1 and saying Atari did it first, but that's like thinking /v/ flaming represents popular opinion, and those guys were probably already balding by the time they wrote those posts
>>12489156>Saying it was behind the times is an understatement, it's like a man on a horse trying to race a Ferrari.How is that not beating a dead horse when responding to someone who stated it was behind the times? Nobody gives a fuck about the 7800, but its a perfect example of how the industry would have gone if it didn't improve from the crash. It moved forward more than people give it credit compared to the 2600 and the already misguided 5200, it just kept going in the wrong direction. Its an important distinction because if Atari didn't have their heads in their asses at the time and adapted like their competition, it could have revitalized the brand and kept in the console game for longer.
>>12489167>How is that not beating a dead horse when responding to someone who stated it was behind the times?Maybe it is maybe it isn't, my point is that he just wanted to reinforce the other guy's point.
>>12488849wasn't the Famicom also intended to bring what was then the latest arcade tech home?
>>12489179>wasn't the Famicom also intended to bring what was then the latest arcade tech home?Japan was a bit ahead of the curve, they were starting to come out with side scrollers. Xevious came out in arcades a few months before the Famicom's launch.
>>12489179Mostly. Yamauchi's main goal for the Famicom was for it to be able to play a good game of Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr, but these weren't quite "the latest arcade tech". Nintendo's most recent arcade game at the time was Popeye, and the Famicom port of it is quite lacking.
>>12489194actually it's quite good especially compared to the numerous other crap ports of Popeye on home computers and the Atari 2600the biggest technical issue with home system ports was that the arcade had hi-res graphics because King Features included the requirement that the sprites have to look like the characters and not be Lego block shit. it's actually just a standard 15Khz monitor but they used interlacing to get 480i so that wasn't possible to recreate at home until 6th gen consoles when 480i became the norm.
>>12489212The Famicom isn't quite able to handle Xevious either. Nintendo's next game Mario Bros also got downscaled a bit.
>>12489216https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io2AADdwATYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0uoQTMnzs4It's a pretty good port, gets you about 80% there. This was also the first Famicom game with a 32k PRG. As for Mario Bros. yes that's cut down some because it was only 16k, although years later they had PAL exclusive remake with a larger ROM.
>>12489216>>12489228Now let's take a look at Atari 7800 Xevious
>>12489212Honestly, I respect Coleco version for trying to match arcade Popeye sprites size.
>>12489231https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubDG1MTnhhQ
>>12489231https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubDG1MTnhhQblocky. the sound isn't quite as good, but it also probably plays inaccurately since they didn't have the arcade source code.
>>12489228they didn't have the falling icicles. none of the original group of home system ports of Mario Bros did except the Apple II one.
>>12489228Most arcade games up to 86 are quite doable, after that arcade tech got too advanced and the Famicom couldn't keep up with the latest ones.
>>12489005I know CBS had games with 256 bytes of cartridge RAM. It was not actually mapped into the address space of the CPU but as you said was accessed indirectly through a TTL.
>>12488985Technically a bare NES can't use cartridge RAM either as there's no address decoding for it. That was provided by the mapper.
>>12489243Both Kaettekita Mario Bros and Mario Bros Classic have themhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsjPIgE-smIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zll16wdrnsM
>>12489259That's some shit tier "translation" in the Kaettekita Mario Bros one.
>>12488321>>"Yes, kids will want to play this instead of Mario and Zelda"Fuck Mario and Zelda. You'll play as Grandpa Munster and you will fucking like it!
>>12488321It had the best port of Joust
>>12488896Now show it in motion.
>>12489450https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-fgC4H8Ma4In all honesty, it is even more impressive in motion.A shame about sounds though.
>>12489454>more impressive in motionThat shit looked jank as fuck. Sound was horrid. Have you not seen Mario Bros?
>>12489461>smaller sprites>no parallax scollingYeah, I sure seen it.
>>12488841I don't think the 7800 would have saved Atari in 1984. Nobody was going to spend $150 for rebuy prettier versions of games they already owned when they could pick up a C64 for $200.
I feel like Atari's userbase was probably a bit older than Nintendo's at the time Maybe it's a bias though
>>12489475Conveniently left out smooth graphics and sound that doesn't suck.
>>12489519>smooth graphicsLooks great on my CRT.>sound that doesn't suck.Haven't felt the need to comment on it again. It's a shame that Ninja Golf didn't include POKEY in the cartridge, but what you gonna do?
>>12489572>but what you gonna do?You can try playing a game that isn't total dogshit. The Genesis was already about by the time that turd was released.
>>12489586Idk man, the game is fine.I played worse on more capable consoles (and I don't mean just Sega System here FYI, okay?)
>>12489586Ninja Golf kicks ass retard
>>12488927>They also fucked up by using the 2600's sound chip instead of the superior POKEY found in the 5200.The whole gist of the 7800 is that it's also backwards compatible with the 2600. So yeah, it seems like they decided to go with a TIA chip instead of a Pokey. Not sure if the backwards compatibility really helped with selling consoles, in the long run. Especially when Atari had the 2600 JR on the market for $50.00. I guess the idea was that the Pokey Chip would be optional in the cartridge, which makes no sense to me. Wouldn't it have been cheaper in the long run to just have one in the system with the TIA? Jack Tramiel was notorious for cutting corners on manufacturing costs. Commando has a TIA chip in the cart. It really doesn't sound bad at all. The game looks alright. It is outputting at a lower resolution than the NES or SMS. But it can do a lot of sprites on screen with no real flicker. Color looks pretty good. https://youtu.be/3TUybTbEm74
>>12489639The 7800 was designed by GCC before Atari was sold to Tramiel's company, Atari didn't have anything to do with the decision to exclude the Pokey.
>>12489639>Not sure if the backwards compatibility really helped with selling consoles, in the long runMaybe not at the time. But Atari got a shitload of complaints because the 5200 wasn't backwards compatible with the 2600, and the fact that the Colecovision COULD play 2600 carts made that a much more attractive console to upgrade to.
>>12489661They actually did release a tumor for the 5200 to play 2600 carts, but it only worked out of the box with the two player system and if you had the four player version, you could send it to Atari who would modify the add on to work with it.
>>12489639you noticed that Commodore's reliability improved noticeably after he left
>>12489419to be honest i'm interested in a grandpa munster gamehe was the best munster
>>12489836It is true the C128, C64C, and Amiga 500 are very solid and usually just work. that was compared to breadbin C64, VIC-20 etc that have a 50% chance of being DOA.
>>12488826They could've released it before the NES but Atari didn't understand video games
>>12489923Jack Tramiel (correctly) wanted to focus on the ST instead of the dead end 7800. However Atari fucked up by making the ST a budget computer instead of a high end videogame console.
>>12489590Fine maybe by Atari standards, but the NES released the year prior. Thing was dead on arrival.
>>12490080Tramiel didn't care about vidya except as a way to make some quick bucks, the focus was all on the ST. After he retired his sons tried to get back into the vidya business but too late.
>>12490101NES wasn't that good until programmers found tricks to make bigger and better games for it years later after its release, improving long after even SNES was out.7800 hardware got quite a bit of the untapped potential.
>>12491096Mario and Duck Hunt released with it, do you have amnesia?
>>12491298It was out for 2 years before SMB, which is one of the reasons why Popeye for it was as bad as it is.
>>12491406How dare you speak about Popeye in that way.
>>12491096This. The NES didn't really even take off in Japan until around 1986 and the system only truly came into it's own through mappers.There were some aspects of the 7800 that blew the NES out of the water, but a lot of it ended up being just wasted potential.
>>12491440actually 85 was when the Famicom blew up, about three quarters of all consoles were sold in 85-86 and most games from this period were guaranteed to sell a million copies.
>>12491440My favorite aspect of the 7800 was that unique PC speaker sound.
>>12491447Xevious was 84 and it was the console's first million seller.
>>12488826The 7800 is a mediocre system that didn't really shine until homebrewers utilized bank switching and the POKEY chip for enhanced audio.
>>12491440>This. The NES didn't really even take off in Japan until around 1986 and the system only truly came into it's own through mappers.the FDS came out in 86 and made more complex games with save features and multiload possible, although cartridge tech was still limited until late in the year when the first 1 megabit ROMs and ASIC mappers arrived.
>>12491460FDS was obsolete by 1990 with many of it's exclusives receiving cartridge releases late in the FC's lifespan
>>12491462It was obsolete by 1987 in fact; the first battery save cartridge (a Shougi game of all things) came out that spring.
>>12491468I was thinking more in terms of raw capacity, but that's true too
>>12491468the FDS was still getting lots of releases all through 87-88 mainly due to the low cost of the games
>>12491479total capacity of a FDS disk is 112k. so still less than even an UNROM cart.
>>12491485>UNROM introduced June, 1986Interesting. The FDS seems kind of useless in that regard lmao.
>>12491432Sure, whatever. You can't tell me it's the best Nintendo could do when Batman: Return of the Joker and Zen the Intergalactic Ninja exist on the same console.
>>12491491Nintendo had originally developed it in 84-85 when the ceiling for mask ROMs was 32k. They underestimated how fast chip manufacturers would adopt the 1.5 μm process which allowed bigger capacity ROMs and higher yields/lower costs.
>>12491491having said that it could still do save games without a password and had soft mirroring select and a scanline IRQ which was not available on any cartridges until 87
Ditto expansion sound.
>>12491497a number of FDS games got cartridge conversions that necessitated converting the scanline IRQ to sprite 0 hit which meant you had the score counter break up when there was a lot of action happening which didn't occur in the original versions
>>12491515Supposedly Mega Man 1 was intended as an FDS release but they switched it to cartridge at the last minute. This could have been space issues >>12491485 or perhaps to simplify localizing it for the US since the game as it was had no changes other than the title screen.
Don't forget the dogshit US controller that probably scared away children who had become accustomed to the NES controller.
>>12491563Reminder that the joystick was designed in 1983, before the NES pad created the controller standard in the west. Yeah, it's shit, but there wasn't really an alternative. The only great game console controller before the NES was the Atari paddle controller.
>>12491576Its almost as if Atari couldn't innovate and their follow up consoles were trash.
>>12491579>reddit spacingThey did innovate. The proline joystick was an upgrade from the CX40. Hell, the 5200 controller was the first gamepad with a true analog stick and a pause button, even it if was an unreliable piece of shit. To say they didn't innovate is fucking retarded. They tried, but they didn't have Yokoi around to invent the dpad that everyone ended up coyping anyway.
>>12491579not after Nolan Bushnell and his guys left the company anyway. the home division had no more engineering talent.
>>12491468Battery saves were extremely expensive, there's a reason so few games had them and why even late SNES era releases used passwords for saving.
>>12491583As mentioned earlier ITT, GCC did the 7800. Bushnell's Chuck E. Cheese faggotry had very little to do with Atari's success outside of Pong.
>>12491581Barely. The controllers on follow up consoles were retarded slight deviations from the original designs and certainly not improved at all in the process.
>>12491594the point is that there wasn't an established standard. this is like whining about how the genesis didn't initially ship with six-button pads when most arcade games were 3 or 4 buttons tops in 1988
>>12491585https://www.jensma.de/snes__/index.phpThey're not that uncommon on SNES carts although most are RPGs and sports games.
>>12491597The Genesis controller even with three main buttons was still an actual improvement on it's predecessor though and felt like an upgrade that made sense, unlike any of Atari's bone headed designs.
>>12491096It wasn't just better programming. Cartridge mappers did a lot to extend the NES's capabilities.
Maybe people will come around to it one day. There are many gems and exclusives on the system worth looking into.
>>12489639I knew it was backwards compatible with the 2600, but I could swear there were plans to add a POKEY at some point that got axed for cost reasons.
>>12491601>you now remember that the original mega drive gamepad had the same amount of buttons as the famicom pad from 5 years earlier
>>12491598the SNES didn't need special cartridge hardware to use a battery save, NES required an ASIC mapper. also NES games with batteries were mostly MMC1 for cost reasons and MMC3 ones were quite rare.
>>12491563>probablyDon't talk about things from before you were born like you knew them.
>>12491609you don't need to hold Reset down when powering off MMC3 or MMC5 battery games although the cartridge shells still had the standard warning label on them anyway.
>>12491613MMC1 can't disable the write lines to the save RAM so you had to hold Reset down to ensure the CPU didn't write gibberish to it when it was powered off.
>>12491607It was also going to have a floppy drive add-on.
>>12491619Shelved within a year of conception in favor of the Mega CD, which despite what /vr/ will say about it, was a legitimate success and moneymaker for Sega.
>>12491563Depending on the game you play, up might be better.
>>12491625Most 7800 games used one button anyway
>>12491603>>12490046Crystalis was MMC3 so it could use 8k PRG banking. This was necessary for a lot of the option/weapon swapping in the game; the object code for each item can be switched in as needed.
>>12491581>Yokoi around to invent the dpad that everyone ended up coyping anyway.D-pad is awful though.Thank God for the likes of NES Advantage.
>>12491610>you must be THIS bald to postseethe more
>>12491632NES advantage is a turd and you have dogshit taste in arcade pads.
>>12491630the one disadvantage was that it didn't have MMC1's single screen mirroring mode which made it easier to do 8 directional scrolling. Rare loved single screen mirroring and used it in all of their games.
>>12491637funny though; the ZX Spectrum could do all that without absurdly expensive add-on chips.
>>12491645You forgot that its games also ran at 10 fps and had a vomit-inducing color palette.
>>12491645how many colors could the ZX spectrum display at once? how many without any attribute clash?
>7800/nes/master system discussion>bong chimes in with muh speccyfor what purpose?
>There he is!>There's Grampa™!
>>12491649>how many colors could the ZX spectrum display at once?16 with 2 colours per each 8x8 block.
>>12491637Rare mostly used AxROM in their NES releases. This was an OC donut steal setup they devised that does 32k PRG banking, CHR RAM, and single screen mirroring. Once in a while they used MMC1.
>>12491654what a fucking piece of shit lmfao. clive thought his little toy computer could compete with IBM fucking KEK
>>12491664Not true btw he meant it as a teaching tool to help British schoolchildren learn programming. He was extremely butthurt and sold the company to Amstrad after he saw the horrors he'd unleashed.
>>12491652the blocky graphics are another indication of Atari's retarded, backward design since Nintendo had made it a priority to have hi-res graphics that actually looked like things.
>>12491670cope, literally every revision of the computer aimed at getting it into enterprise use and failed miserably. ginger clive had to make a retarded bicycle that nobody bought instead
>>12491673That came more out of Japan just valuing visuals more and at that time JPCs already had hi-res graphics.
>>12491652>>There he is!>>There's Grampa™!Atari Marketer one: "I know what will make this game sell... Grampa Munster on the box." Atari Marketer two: "Are you sure?"Atari Marketer one: "Yes! Mu marketing research shows that kids love Grampa Munster. We put his face on the box, and the game will be poised to sell a bajillion copies!"
>>12491645you could make your own games and commercial titles cost 1/3rd of a console game's price
>>12491673Nintendo's sole priority was releasing a game that could play a decent version of Donkey Kong and it still had less levels than it's counterparts. The 7800 could do higher res than the Famicom.
>>12491630the NES in practice becomes a completely different system depending on the cartridge hardware used
>>12491681>gameconsole*muh bad
